


Local Haunt

by Neyiea



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2020-10-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:42:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27164731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neyiea/pseuds/Neyiea
Summary: It's something like a Gotham rite of passage to sneak into the abandoned Arkham Asylum. Bruce has never bothered to before, but it's not as if he could let Jerome go alone, and once Bruce said that he would go Jeremiah was sure to follow.
Relationships: Jeremiah Valeska/Bruce Wayne, Jeremiah Valeska/Jerome Valeska/Bruce Wayne, Jerome Valeska/Bruce Wayne
Comments: 11
Kudos: 106





	Local Haunt

**Author's Note:**

> My real otp is actually Bruce/Happiness so I wanted to give him something nice to make up for the stuff I most recently put him through, haha.
> 
> Plus I remembered that I never wrote anymore soft ot3 antics, so; two birds, one stone.

“This is,” Jeremiah starts with a certain air of dramatism which makes Jerome unsubtly roll his eyes. “The worst idea. Ever.”

“You’re only saying that because you’re no fun,” Jerome mutters before adding, louder, “and because you’re scared of ghosts.”

Jeremiah begins to sputter—obviously on the verge of responding in a way that will only make this entire situation devolve into a trivial fight—and Bruce intervenes both by speaking up and by physically inserting himself between the twins in order to separate them.

“It could be worse,” he reasons, staring at the rusted old gate that they’re going to have to climb over like the multitude of teenaged and young-twenties trespassers had before them. “If we did this on Halloween we’d definitely run into other people.”

Sneaking into the abandoned Arkham Asylum had become something like a test of courage for Gotham youth ever since the place had been shut down nearly twenty years ago. The sprawling building stood in gradually-increasing disrepair; not yet demolished because every few years someone would start lobbying to open up its doors again. It had almost happened a few times, only for plans to fall through due to reasons that were mostly monetary in nature. Reopening Arkham would be an investment that would take years to see the returns of, leaving many wary of investing in something that already had a nefarious history that included unjust imprisonments, bloody riots, and bloodier breakouts. 

And so it continued to sit, a ghost looming upon Gotham’s horizon, undisturbed but for a single guard and the occasional intruding group who were either looking to prove something or looking for a fright. 

Despite growing up in Gotham Bruce had never snuck over the fence in an attempt to find entry via an open window or an unlocked door, and his disinterest in doing such a thing would have continued on into adulthood were it not for how excited Jerome had been once he’d heard about it.

If no one had agreed to go with Jerome tonight he would have simply gone alone, and then Bruce would be up all night worrying that Jerome had fallen from the top of the fence and had broken a leg within the first five minutes of his trespassing, so really there was little for Bruce to do but tag along.

And once Bruce agreed to tag along it was only a matter of seconds before Jeremiah agreed to it, too, although he’d been very vocal about how much he found the entire endeavor to be ridiculous. The twins had been exchanging somewhat petty insults the entire drive here, not so unlike their usual brotherly quarrels that Bruce felt as though he should be overly concerned by it but wearying all the same.

It was at times like these where Bruce found himself very glad to be an only child. 

“Are we sure there’s only one guard here overnight?” Jeremiah asks before they can begin their climb.

“Just one,” Bruce responds, briefly laying a reassuring hand upon Jeremiah’s shoulder. “They’re mostly employed to make sure that no one hurts themselves on the property, so if we do get caught as long as we give ourselves up without a fight they’ll let us off with just a warning.”

There’s a beat of silence. 

“I can feel the both of you looking at me,” Jerome says, reaching out to grab onto bars with gloved hands. “And I am insulted at your lack of faith.”

Jeremiah sighs. Bruce bites his lip to keep from smiling too wide.

“Please just remember that if we get detained and Alfred has to pick us up in the middle of the night, he isn’t going to be very happy.” With any of them, but Bruce would be able to apologize and hug his way into forgiveness. It wouldn’t be nearly as easy for the twins. 

Jerome mumbles something under his breath—he was always so affronted that he couldn’t simply charm Alfred into liking him, Bruce finds it more than a little funny—and begins to heave himself up the fence with only a small amount of difficulty.

Bruce turns to Jeremiah again.

“Do you need help with a boost up?”

“No. No, I think I’ll be able to handle this.” Jeremiah rolls up the sleeves of his sweater, a determined look settling over his features.

“See you on the other side,” Bruce says, and then he begins to climb, too. 

They do all manage to make it over the fence, and once Jeremiah’s feet hit the soft soil they take a moment to look at the shadowy, foreboding structure sprawled before them.

“This is like the beginning of a bad horror movie,” Jeremiah comments under his breath. “If I get murdered by a serial killer I am going to be so pissed off.”

“No one is getting murdered by a serial killer.”

“Yeah, if anything we’re just going to get pushed around by angry ghosts.”

Bruce shoots Jerome a look, meaning to lightly reprimand him, but he gets distracted by the feeling of Jeremiah’s fingers intertwining with his own and squeezing. 

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Jeremiah says evenly. “But I do believe in serial killers.”

“Please stop mentioning serial killers. We’ve barely started and I’m already going to be looking over my shoulder all night.”

Jerome takes Bruce’s other hand, squeezing harder and grinning.

“Don’t worry, Brucie. I’ll keep you safe from whatever living or dead entities are hanging out in a spooky hidey-hole.” 

“So will I.”

Honestly, these two.

“I can’t use my flashlight if you’re both holding my hands.”

“Do we really need three flashlights? Seems like we’d be more noticeable that way.”

“I hate to admit it, but Jerome does have a point.”

Bruce rolls his eyes, but he doesn’t yank his hands away. The twins could be a bit much sometimes, even during the rare moments where they happened to be on their own, but Bruce had slowly grown accustomed to their flare for the dramatics just as he’d grown accustomed to their tendency to partake in petty arguments. Plus he knew that their habit of intruding upon his personal space was driven mostly by the fact that they got all sweetly weak in the knees whenever he bestowed them with any kind of physical affection, whether it be bumping elbows, holding hands, or brief one-armed hugs. 

Someday Bruce is going to kiss them, and he imagines they’ll only be that much more eager to start something once kissing is clearly an option. He’s kind of looking forward to it, actually.

He likes feeling wanted. 

They make their way towards the building, Bruce—having grown up in Gotham and therefore having heard multiple first and second-hand accounts of other peoples’ entry into Arkham during high school—leading the way to the most likely entry point. A window on the first floor with the pane completely removed, which appeared to be boarded up from the inside. He’d heard, more than once, that the wooden boards were actually on a hinge at the top, and all it took was a bit of a push to open them up enough to slip inside quickly and quietly. 

Many of the windows on the lower levels have been shattered over the nearly two decades that the asylum has been shut down. The majority still had the broken remains of the glass as a border in front of the wooden boards they’d been subsequently sealed with, but there were a few windows where the panes had been removed entirely. On the boards of one of those windows Bruce sees a familiar series of initials engraved into the wood, as if carved by a knife. 

S.K + B.P, nestled inside of a heart, is as good an indicator as any that this is the window whose boards are on a hinge. 

And knowing that this place had been the destination of one of Selina and Bridgit’s dates made it slightly less scary.

He wonders if many people go trespassing here for a date. He wonders if that means that _this_ is kind of like a date. He would have dressed a little nicer if he’d thought that this was the sort of place where people hung around to secretly kiss on top of ghost-hunting and thrill-seeking. And he would have brought along some lip chap and mints, too. 

“I think it’s this one. If you push along the bottom it should open.”

Jerome does so and, as expected, the boards open on a hinge. 

“Ha! I didn’t even have to break out my lock-picking kit.” He flashes Bruce a smile and lets go of his hand in order to brace both palms against the sill of the window and boost himself up and inside. Bruce follows, then Jeremiah, and the boards shut behind them.

“It was easier to get inside than I thought it would be,” Jeremiah comments lowly, sweeping his flashlight around the large room that they’ve entered.

“It was probably harder the first few years after it was shut down.” Bruce’s eyes follow the path of the flashlight. Old tables and chairs are scattered around, and tall bookshelves with no books stand at one end of the room. It was likely that this was some kind of communal space for recreational activities. “This is something of a Gotham tradition. A rite of passage, I guess. It’s only easy because so many people before us have done it.” Jeremiah’s flashlight stretches out directly across from them and it catches on thin, crosshatched metal.

A fence.

It’s eerie to see, even though Jerome’s flashlight settles upon the open set of gates leading into the area. When people were inside of here they were essentially caged. Bruce would have preferred a solid wall to keep the recreational area separated from the hallway, as opposed to a ceiling to floor fence. Not even the graffiti evident across the entirety of the room—proof that people had lingered here long enough to leave their mark—takes away the feeling of being shut in while simultaneously being watched. 

The twins grab onto Bruce’s hands again, and this time he doesn’t roll his eyes, instead he squeezes back.

Jerome clears his throat so suddenly that both Bruce and Jeremiah jerk.

“Hey there, ghosties,” he says, his normal volume loud in the stifling quiet. He sounds like he’s on the verge of laughter. “It’s me, ya boy.”

Jeremiah and Bruce groan, and Jerome’s laughter finally bursts forth, filling up the room and seeming to chase away the slowly climbing unease. They are not caged in, because the gates are open. They are not being watched, because there is no one to observe them. They are not the inmates of long ago.

“I can’t believe that we’re related by blood.”

“Sometimes I have trouble believing it, too.”

Bruce smiles, fondness tugging at something tender in his chest which he has—privately, for the past little while—labeled as a set of crushes. 

“Come on, guys, let’s get going.”

They slip out of the recreational area and into the hallway beyond. The walls are covered in a combination of cracked paint, peeling plaster, and spray-paint tags and murals ranging in complexity and age. They pass by what looks to be an old security desk, enclosed in what appeared to be untouched, likely shatter-proof, glass. 

To break an outer window and run was one thing, but to attempt to even leave so much as a scratch on this glass while inside the building, when a guard could be only a few turns behind you, was evidently something that no one had dared to try.

“Those are some heavy looking doors.” Jerome shines his flashlight along the entry to a hallway which two large doors bracket. “Think they made them like that to keep everyone in there in case some of them busted out of their cells?”

“They’re probably fire doors.” Jeremiah tosses a look at Jerome from over Bruce’s head. “They’d just be closed in case of a fire in order to keep it from spreading.”

“Dual-purpose, then. For fires and for madmen. How many breakouts happened here, again?”

“Too many,” Bruce answers as they begin to trek down the hallway, eyes kept firmly to the front, not wanting to look directly inside any of the cells that they were passing. The windows of the cells were small slits near the ceiling, too thin for anyone to attempt to crawl through, too high to look at anything but the sky, too small to seem humane.

Too small to let in much of the dim moonlight

“Where’s the cool stuff?” Jerome wonders aloud, voice even, although he’s gripping at Bruce’s hand tight enough to make it seem like he was at least a little unnerved by what he was seeing. Forty to fifty years ago, while Arkham was in its heyday, it wouldn’t have taken much for any of them to end up inside one of these cells based on one diagnosis or another, or based upon their preferred companions. “A room where Doctors performed super unethical tests, or something. I bet a place like that would have a whole lot of—”

A beam of light passes over a white face and Bruce barely manages to bite back a scream while beside him Jeremiah curses. Jerome’s flashlight immediately swings back over to reveal not a face, but a mask, painted partway up the wall. It is stark white, like bone, with seemingly empty sockets for eyes and a strange apparatus over the mouth.

_Lady Arkham_ is written in red above it. 

“Who the fuck is that supposed to be?”

“I’m not sure.” Bruce tugs them forward, not wanting to linger in front of the eerie depiction. “This entire place was once the Arkham family estate, before it was repurposed and renovated. It might be referring to someone who’s been dead a long time.” The Arkham surname had died out in Gotham, due to some sort of tragedy that Bruce can’t exactly recall the details of. Death and madness was the gist of what he could remember. “Or it’s just someone’s street name. Probably the later.”

They pass by the rest of the cells in tense silence and after they turn down the next hallway they come across what could have once been rooms meant for treatment. They go through them, one by one, not lingering for too long when there is so little to see. Most of the equipment is long-gone, but in one room they do find a disgusting old cot with wrist and ankle restraints affixed to the metal frame. There is another room immediately beside it, narrow, as if it had once been filled with a row or two or chairs.

There is a pane of glass between the rooms.

Bruce feels unease again. The restraints. The adjacent room. Tapped. Watched.

He breaks out into goosebumps and fights back a shudder. 

“Spooky,” Jerome intones, casting his flashlight around. There is more vandalism in here, most notably sets of narrowed eyes stenciled multiple times across every brick wall, and once on the very center of the glass divide. “Are there any ghost around?” He poses the question aloud, and not to Bruce or Jeremiah. His eyes are instead fixed upon the blank space in front of his face. “Bet you were glad when this hell-hole got shut the fuck down, huh?”

They are all silent, as if waiting for an answer.

Nothing speaks back.

“I think I’ve had enough of this place,” Jeremiah whispers. “We’re lucky we’ve gone as far as we have without getting caught. It’s time to turn back the way we came.”

They turn to go, and Bruce is glad to leave the coupled rooms behind. He keeps his eyes forward as they walk by the cells again, not wanting to catch a glimpse of the so-called Lady Arkham even from the corner of his eye. They make it past the security booth, and then they come across the fence that divided the recreational area from the hallway.

Bruce darts a glance at the twins on either side of him, and even in the dark he can tell that Jerome’s expression is practically radiating disappointment. 

“You didn’t actually expect to see or hear any ghosts, did you?”

“I dunno. I think it would have been cool to hear some whispers or footsteps, or to see a shadow appear from out of nowhere.” Jerome shrugs, looking down at his shoes scuffing against the concrete floor. “I would have protected you, if you got scared.”

“We both would have,” Jeremiah interjects, never one to be outdone. “You’d be the safest person to have ever trespassed in here.”

The tenderness in Bruce’s chest turns warm.

I would protect you too, he means to say, but he catches sight of something in the darkness up ahead.

A dim light shining upon the walls of the hallway.

A dim light coming closer.

“The guard, the guard,” he hisses through his teeth. Jeremiah and Jerome turn off their flashlights and they all rush as silently as they can into the recreation room, immediately going to the boards with the hidden hinge. Jerome pries it open and Jeremiah stands aside for Bruce to go through first. 

He all but jumps out, tumbling into a heap on the ground. Jeremiah follows, dropping to his feet with a muted thud, and then Jerome slips out much slower, trying to ease the boards down so that they don’t slam shut and alert the guard to the presence of anyone outside.

The run across the open area to the fence, and as they reach it they look back, waiting to see if the boards will be flung open, waiting for a light to be cast in their direction.

It doesn’t happen.

Jerome laughs under his breath. Jeremiah sighs in obvious relief. Bruce smiles at them both, feeling even warmer.

“I would protect you, too,” he says. Jeremiah turns towards him first, and Bruce leans up onto his toes to press a quick kiss to the corner of his mouth before doing the same to Jerome. “Because I really like you both.” They stare at him, seemingly dumbstruck, but Bruce is patient enough for them to figure things out for themselves.

And he’s also one hundred percent certain that they like him back. 

“Come on, I’ll stop somewhere on the drive back and we can grab some milkshakes or something.” Bruce grabs onto the bars of the fence and begins to climb. “Then we can have a movie night at my place, if you’re up for it.”

“Uhh, will there—” Jeremiah clears his throat, and Bruce pauses at the top of the fence to look down at them. “Will there be… More kissing during movie night?”

Bruce grins down at them.

“If you like.”


End file.
